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When The Sith Hits The Fan

Just to put the following into some sort of perspective for those of you didn’t come here from Pewpewlazerz, I played World of Warcraft for six years in a raiding guild. We weren’t world-beaters by any stretch of the imagination but got a couple of server firsts and if there was heroic 25-man raid content out there, we were beating it on a regular basis. Eventually, however, the magic wore off and I quit WoW a few months before the release of The Old Republic. I was tired of being on the hamster wheel, grinding the same daily quests, smacking my head against the same raid bosses in different skins… you know the drill.

I wasn’t alone. A couple of guys from the guild felt the same way and had been playing less and less, and when I quit one of them contacted me with the news that he was setting up a SWTOR social guild and would I like to join? And so that’s what I did. The idea of story-based levelling appealed to me, and the idea of not being in a semi-hardcore raiding guild with people who felt the same way appealed even more. We decided that we were in it for fun, would just run flashpoints and the occasional 8 player normal mode Operation once we reached the level cap. Having considerably more free time than most, I hit 50 on Calli pretty quickly and settled down to level alts and explore the galaxy while I waited for the tanks and dps to catch up.

And waited.

And waited.

And then two tanks hit 50, having already gathered a few level 50 dps characters amongst us and so I waited for them to gear up and get ready for flashpoints.

And waited.

And waited.

It turned out that one tank hit 50, did one flashpoint, then logged off and started levelling alts, never to be seen again. The other, whenever he was on, which wasn’t often, couldn’t be prised out of warzones for love nor money, despite all his grand promises of taking on pve content at 50 while I was running him through Maelstrom Prison and Taral V. So I thought to myself “screw this” and started levelling my own tank. Enter Aluriel stage left. Jedi Guardian tank, never stepped foot inside a level 50 flashpoint yet and has 16.5k health. I’m tanking Flashpoints for you now, who’s with me?

Guys? Hello?

So yes. Seriously pissed off right now. Of course I could just PuG flashpoints, except I had some truly horrific experiences early on doing that. Allow me to give you an example. Let’s say there are five bad guys, three of them are elites, two are not. Two of the people in your group have very good crowd control, so you use it before the pull and now there’s just one elite and two strong mobs. Out of those three, which do you think the tank should initially grab aggro on before gathering up the rest? Yes that’s right, obviously. The elite. Except this tank decided the way to do things was to jump on top of one of the non-elites, do just enough area damage to break ALL the crowd control but not enough to beat healing aggro and then tank just one of the non-elites, leaving yours truly to “tank” the other four mobs, three of which, I hasten to remind you, were elites.

It didn’t end well.

And in case you’re all thinking “well anyone can make a mistake once”, this retard did the exact same thing not just once but three times on the same group of bad guys before my sanity snapped. So thanks to mouth-breathing window-lickers like this moron, I don’t PuG flashpoints. All of which leaves me with precious little to do other than run Ilum dailies to gear up companions or level more alts. So I levelled more alts. And then that started to get seriously boring around about the time I got my fourth character to Hoth, because no amount of story-based levelling can distract you from the fact that you’re on a planet where it takes 15 minutes of driving to get to the next quest and another 15 minutes to drive back and hand it in, and I realised I just didn’t have the willpower to do it anymore. I needed to be in a guild that actually did stuff.

So I’m now on trial in a small guild of nice folks who raid four times a week on Nightmare modes. Funny how no matter how much things change, they just stay the same.

I hope you’re enjoying the nightmare mode thing at least – even if it is the same as what you did on WoW. God knows you need a little enjoyment after relying on goofballs only to be let down. D: That sounds -terrible-.

To be fair to my old guild, they’re all good people, but their definition of casual differred a LOT from mine. Speaking of which, I was concerned that jumping right back into the old raiding grind was a bad move but it seems my fears were unfounded. Logged in tonight to find out I was healing Karraga’s Palace on Hard Mode, talk about a trial by fire! But we cleared the place in, I dunno, an hour and a half? For the record that’s the first time I healed ANYTHING on a Scoundrel. I made some noob mistakes but found it to be actually very enjoyable, it’s totally different from any other kind of healing I’ve done. Coming away from the raid with 2.5k more health and 11% more haste then when I went in didn’t hurt either. I think I’ve made the right choice.